Torso

Iggy Pop, who was once known as the Godfather of Punk and who now, at sixty-three, might better be called the Grandfather of Punk, was at Barneys Co-Op last week, promoting a new line of T-shirts bearing his image. Hiring Pop to sell shirts seems an incongruity on the order of hiring Michael Stipe to sell styling gel: his is the most celebrated bare torso in rock and roll, those of Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison notwithstanding, and neither age nor gravity has curbed Pop’s preference for being stripped naked to the waist.

“I don’t wear shirts, it’s true,” Pop said. “Though when I want to go out for a nice dinner with my wife, I favor a Brioni.” At Barneys, he was shirtless, though not topless: he wore a cream-colored suit by Dolce & Gabbana, customized with buttons by Chrome Hearts, and a black vest by Versace. A slash of exposed chest looked not so much tanned as cured, like unsliced bresaola. His face, always gaunt and high-cheekboned, now looks like that of an actor playing a Native American elder in a nineteen-fifties Western. His hair, once black and cropped, is now blond, soft and wispy, like that of a toddler yet to have his first trim. His pubic hair, he volunteered, is also blond. “Because I go nude a lot,” he said. For the past decade, Pop has lived near Miami, where he is able to go shirtless year-round.

To complement his cultivated shirtlessness, Pop has generally favored jeans. “In the sixties, I used to wear really cheap ones called Male,” he said. “They were so cool. They had the Continental pocket—never diagonal, literally just a slit. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but they were cut tight in the crotch. Now I’ll wear a pair of whatever anyone gives me. I have Versace, Chrome Hearts, Varvatos, Vans.” Onstage, where he still appears around thirty times a year, he likes a little stretch in his denim. “My wife bought two pairs of LVs four or five years ago, and they still stand up,” he said. “They do quality. But you feel kind of funny wearing poncy French jeans.” Pop admitted to being perplexed by the trend, among young men, of wearing jeans very low, a look that he in some sense pioneered. “If somebody has a nice ass crack, then I am always interested to have a look at it—that’s the simian in me,” he said. “But what looks funny to me is when they do it with the underwear showing. I get the idea—they are trying to show they are ready to breed, that they are alive in that sector, and they are trying to show a disrespect of a certain vague sort. It’s kind of interesting, kind of dumb.” For his part, Pop wears no underwear, exposed or otherwise. “Things like that give me the creeps,” he said. He feels similarly about socks.

Pop’s venture with Sony Music, which is producing the Pop T-shirts as part of its Archive 1887 line, is only the latest in a recent spate of commercial activity: in the past year, he has appeared (shirtless) in advertisements for a broadband company and an insurance company. “It’s like this: I made some fucking great-sounding music that still sounds fucking great, and—to drop my intellect and just get emotional about it—a bunch of fat fucks and pricks wouldn’t play my music anywhere where anybody could hear it, wouldn’t sell it in a part of the store where it could be bought,” he said. “From the commercials, other people get to know me, and they check out the music.”

Pop conceded that there are occasions that call for a T-shirt, particularly now that he has a free closetful of them. “I wear one when I get cold, like anyone else,” he said. There have been two T-shirts in his sartorial history that he has worn with any enthusiasm: a concert shirt that he bought after seeing T. Rex in London in 1972, and one designed for Tony Hawk, the skateboarder, in the eighties.

He stays in shape with daily Qigong practice. “It’s about increasing your breathing capacity to the point where air becomes food,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you eat, you won’t gain weight. After forty minutes of it, my troubles seem smaller, and I am more excited and more calm at the same time.” But Pop admitted that there have been times, lately, when his unclad torso has met with disapproval. “You know, from time to time, if I take my shirt off now, it doesn’t look the way it did when I was thirty-two,” he said. “It’s, like, ugh. But look—when I am playing, I’m the shit. As long as that’s true, I can take it off.” ♦